Estimating the true global burden of mental illness.

It is argued that the global burden of mental illness is underestimated and the reasons for under-estimation are examined to identify five main causes: overlap between psychiatric and neurological disorders; the grouping of suicide and self-harm as a separate category; conflation of all chronic pain syndromes with musculoskeletal disorders; exclusion of personality disorders from disease burden calculations; and inadequate consideration of the contribution of severe mental illness to mortality from associated causes.